Even before the dawn one Friday morning I
noticed a young man, handsome and strong, walking the alleys of our
city. He was pulling an old cart filled with clothes, both bright and
new,
and he was calling in a clear, tenor voice:

"Rags! Rags! New rags for old! I take your
tired rags! Rags!"

Soon the Ragman saw a woman sitting on her
back porch. She was sobbing into a handkerchief, sighing, and shedding
a thousand tears. Her knees and elbows made a sad X. Her heart was
breaking.

The Ragman stopped his cart. Quietly, he
walked to the woman, stepping round tin cans, dead toys, and diapers.

"Give me your rag," he said so gently, "and
I'll give you another."

He slipped the handkerchief from her eyes.
She looked up, and he laid across her palm a linen cloth so clean and
new that it shined. She blinked from the gift to the giver.

Then, as he began to pull his cart again,
the Ragman did a strange thing: he put her stained handkerchief to his
own face; and then he began to weep, to sob as grievously as she had
done, his shoulders shaking. Yet she was left without a tear.

"This is a wonder," I breathed to myself.

"Rags! Rags! New rags for old!"

In a little while, when the sky showed gray
behind the rooftops and I could see the shredded curtains hanging out
black windows, the Ragman came upon a girl whose head was wrapped in a
bandage. Blood soaked her bandage. A single line of blood ran down her
cheek.

Now the tall Ragman looked upon this child
with pity, and he drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart.

"Give me your rag," he said, tracing his own
line on her cheek, "and I will give you mine."

The child could only gaze at him while he
loosened the bandage, removed it, and tied it to his own head. The
bonnet he set on hers. And I gasped at what I saw for with the bandage
went
the wound! Against his brow it ran a darker, more substantial
blood--his own!

The sun hurt both the sky, now, and my eyes;
the Ragman seemed more and more to hurry.

"Are you going to work?" he asked a man who
leaned against a telephone pole. The man shook his head.

The ragman pressed him: "Do you have a job?"

"Are you crazy?" sneered the other. He
pulled away from the pole, revealing the right sleeve of his
jacket-flat, the cuff stuffed into the pocket. He had no arm.

"So," said the Ragman. "Give me your jacket,
and I'll give you mine."

The one-armed man took off his jacket. So
did the Ragman - and I trembled at what I saw: for the Ragman's arm
stayed in its sleeve, and when the other put it on he had two good
arms, thick as tree limbs; but the Ragman had only one.

"Go to work," he said.

After that he found a drunk, lying
unconscious beneath an army blanket, an old man, hunched, wizened, and
sick. He took the blanket and wrapped it around himself, but for the
drunk he
left new clothes.

And now I had to run to keep up with the
Ragman. He was weeping uncontrollably, and bleeding freely at the
forehead, pulling his cart with one arm, falling again and again,
exhausted.

I wept to see the change in this man. I hurt
to see his sorrow. And yet I needed to see where he was going in such
haste, perhaps to know what drove him so.

The little old Ragman - he came to a
landfill. He came to the garbage pits. He climbed a hill. With
tormented labor he cleared a little space on that hill. Then he sighed.
He lay down.
He pillowed his head on a handkerchief and a jacket. He covered his
bones with an army blanket. And, he died.

Oh, how I cried to witness that death! I
slumped in a junked car and wailed and mourned as one who has not hope
- because I had come to love the Ragman. I sobbed myself to sleep.

I did not know – how could I know?
– that I slept through Friday night and Saturday and its
night too.

But then, on Sunday, I was awakened by a
violence.

Light-pure, hard, demanding light-slammed
against my sour face, and I blinked. There was the Ragman, folding the
blanked most carefully, a scar on his forehead, but alive! And, besides
that, healthy! There was no sign of sorrow nor of age, and all the rags
that he had gathered shined for cleanliness.

Well, then I lowered my head and, trembling
for all that I had seen, I myself walked up to the Ragman. I told him
my name with shame, for I was a sorry figure next to him. I said to him
with dear yearning in my voice: "Dress me."

He dressed me. My Lord, he put new rags on
me, and I am a wonder beside him. The Ragman, the Ragman, the Christ!